A hot-tempered blue-collar butcher kills just one man, a bullying taxi driver whom surely no one will miss, and by the end of the week winds up with a veritable stockyard of corpses in his tiny home during a Spanish summer... more &raquo heat wave. It all starts when Marco's girlfriend insists he go to the police, and he strangles her to keep her quiet. Soon everyone he cares for is dropping by the increasingly crowded house looking for one victim or another, and Marco, as out of control as a rabid dog, keeps on killing, one cover-up leading to another. The stinking pile of bodies soon has all the neighborhood dogs smacking their lips, until he starts dropping his fetid victims into the slaughterhouse grinder, piece by piece. Though it sounds more like a farce than a humid thriller, it's neither a black comedy nor a gory bloodfest (despite the misleading title, there is no cannibal in this picture). Marco turns from macho hothead to doleful wretch as he numbly executes each successive victim as if it's a tortured chore demanded by mocking gods. Writer-director Eloy de la Iglesia doesn't shirk on the dirty deeds--one unlucky fellow gets a cleaver full on the face--but this is less a spectacle than a woebegone portrait of the spiritual disintegration of an angry antihero. --Sean Axmaker&laquo less

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Movie Reviews

Where's the beef?

06/08/2000

(3 out of 5 stars)

"Real slaughterhouse footage and scenes of dirty urban slums set the tone for this stark and obsessive Spanish horror flick. A slaughterhouse employee named Marcos gets attacked by a cabdriver who takes objection when he and his girlfriend are making out in the back seat, and Marcos kills him. This sets in motion a week of killing, first to cover up the cabdriver's death, and afterward to keep the bodies piling up in his bedroom a secret. He tries to dispose of the body parts at the slaughterhouse, but he can't do it fast enough and soon the stench of the corpses is becoming a problem, and Marcos slips further and further into madness. Weird, pseudo-sleazy film that works even though it doesn't even attempt to live up to its title - there's *no cannibalism*. The dubbing is pretty bad and there's not much gore (most of the nastiness happens off-screen), but there's plenty of atmosphere and a sense of desperation builds in Marco's apartment. The DVD looks great except there is a little "film flicker" in a few scenes - nothing bad though. It's not big on splatter, but it's still worth a look for Eurohorror fans."

Anchor Bay rescues another so-so obscurity

man_invisible | Dork, PA | 12/06/2000

(3 out of 5 stars)

"Eloy De La Iglesia's "Cannibal Man" isn't about horror or even cannibalism. Instead, it's more of a parable about lower-class oppression and how the poor are deemed insignificant by the rest of society.Marcos (Vincente Parra), a slaughterhouse worker with a beautiful young girlfriend, accidentally kills a cab driver and as a result becomes increasingly homicidal toward people over the course of one week. He's befriended by an eccentric who lives in an imposing apartment highrise nearby, and eventually Marcos becomes undone by guilt and the fact that he'll never get away with his crimes."Cannibal Man" is an odd title for this movie, considering there's no cannibalism (save for a brief soup-eating scene, but I don't think that qualifies) and it really comes from an era that preceded the 'cannibal/zombie boom' of the late 1970's and early 80's. The murders are relatively brief and not very inspired by today's standards (how many times have we seen a meat cleaver through the face in slasher films?), but the interaction between Marcos and his friend Nester is what really makes the movie. Morality, and--to a lesser degree--sexuality are questioned in a way that make "Cannibal Man"'s by-the-numbers bloodshed forgivable.Recommended, but view with an open mind. This isn't the horror of Fulci or Argento, but is still worth a look."